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Applying the study’s findings to the latest data from the CDC suggests that up to 2.5 million older adults may have been affected by long COVID. For those individuals, the consequences can be devastating: the onset of disability, the inability to work, reduced ability to carry out activities of daily life, and a lower quality of life.
But in many seniors, long COVID is difficult to recognize.
“The challenge is that nonspecific symptoms such as fatigue, weakness, pain, confusion, and increased frailty are things we often see in seriously ill older adults. Or people may think, ‘That’s just part of aging,’” said Dr. Charles Thomas Alexander Semelka, a postdoctoral fellow in geriatric medicine at Wake Forest University.
Ann Morse, 72, of Nashville, Tennessee, was diagnosed with COVID in November 2020 and recovered at home after a trip to the emergency room and follow-up home visits from nurses every few days. She soon began having trouble with her memory, attention, and speech, as well as sleep problems and severe fatigue. Though she’s improved somewhat, several cognitive issues and fatigue persist to this day.
“What was frustrating was I would tell people my symptoms and they’d say, ‘Oh, we’re like that too,’ as if this was about getting older,” she told me. “And I’m like, but this happened to me suddenly, almost overnight.”
Bell, a singer-songwriter in Nashville, had a hard time getting adequate follow-up attention after spending two weeks in intensive care and an additional five weeks in a nursing home receiving rehabilitation therapy.
“I wasn’t getting answers from my regular doctors about my breathing and other issues. They said take some over-the-counter medications for your sinus and things like that,” he said. Bell said his real recovery began after he was recommended to specialists at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.
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James Jackson, director of long-term outcomes at Vanderbilt’s Critical Illness, Brain Dysfunction, and Survivorship Center, runs several long COVID support groups that Morse and Bell attend and has worked with hundreds of similar patients. He estimates that about a third of those who are older have some degree of cognitive impairment.
“We know there are significant differences between younger and older brains. Younger brains are more plastic and effective at reconstituting, and our younger patients seem able to regain their cognitive functioning more quickly,” he said.
In extreme cases, COVID infections can lead to dementia. That may be because older adults who are severely ill with COVID are at high risk of developing delirium — an acute and sudden change in mental status — which is associated with the subsequent development of dementia, said Dr. Liron Sinvani, a geriatrician and an assistant professor at Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York.
Older patients’ brains also may have been injured from oxygen deprivation or inflammation. Or disease processes that underlie dementia may already have been underway, and a COVID infection may serve as a tipping point, hastening the emergence of symptoms.
Research conducted by Sinvani and colleagues, published in March, found that 13% of COVID patients who were 65 and older and hospitalized at Northwell Health in March 2020 or April 2020 had evidence of dementia a year later.
Dr. Thomas Gut, associate chair of medicine at Staten Island University Hospital, which opened one of the first long COVID clinics in the U.S., observed that becoming ill with COVID can push older adults with preexisting conditions such as heart failure or lung disease “over the edge” to a more severe impairment.
In older adults especially, he said, “it’s hard to attribute what’s directly related to COVID and what’s a progression of conditions they already have.”
That wasn’t true for Richard Gard, 67, who lives just outside New Haven, Connecticut, a self-described “very healthy and fit” sailor, scuba diver, and music teacher at Yale University who contracted COVID in March 2020. He was the first COVID patient treated at Yale New Haven Hospital, where he was critically ill for 2½ weeks, including five days in intensive care and three days on a ventilator.
In the two years since, Gard has spent more than two months in the hospital, usually for symptoms that resemble a heart attack. “If I tried to walk up the stairs or 10 feet, I would almost pass out with exhaustion, and the symptoms would start — extreme chest pain radiating up my arm into my neck, trouble breathing, sweating,” he said.
Dr. Erica Spatz, director of the preventive cardiovascular health program at Yale, is one of Gard’s physicians. “The more severe the COVID infection and the older you are, the more likely it is you’ll have a cardiovascular complication after,” she said. Complications include weakening of the heart muscle, blood clots, abnormal heart rhythms, vascular system damage, and high blood pressure.
Gard’s life has changed in ways he never imagined. Unable to work, he takes 22 medications and can still walk only 10 minutes on level ground. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a frequent, unwanted companion.
“A lot of times it’s been difficult to go on, but I tell myself I just have to get up and try one more time,” he told me. “Every day that I get a little bit better, I tell myself I’m adding another day or week to my life.”
Kaiser Health News is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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